For several years now, I’ve been going to Cornwall for a week during the Easter Holidays — usually to Bude in North Cornwall. Bude has the advantage of being working class and unpretentious, so you’re unlikely to bump into any Guardian readers. My children and I can sit on the beach, tucking into our McDonald’s Happy Meals, without attracting any disapproving glances.
But the house we usually rent wasn’t available this year, so Caroline suggested we go to St Ives instead. I agreed without giving the matter a second thought, unaware that St Ives is ground zero for trendy north London couples with young children. This is on account of its reputation as an ‘artists’ colony’. It was home to Bernard Leach and Barbara Hepworth and since 1993 it has boasted its very own Tate Gallery. The Guardian named it Britain’s best seaside town in 2007.
This was a major victory for Caroline in the culture war that’s been going on in our household since our first child was born. As someone who was brought up in Hampstead and went to Cheltenham Ladies College, Caroline has ‘good’ taste. She reads novels by William Boyd, eats vegetarian food and likes to spend the weekends visiting museums and galleries. I, on the other hand, suffer from ‘bad’ taste. Having been educated entirely in the state sector, I like football, convenience food and Harry Bosch novels. My favourite movie of last year was Battleship.
The ‘war’ doesn’t consist in each of us trying to force our particular values on our children. Rather, it’s Caroline versus the rest of us. That’s because all children naturally gravitate towards schlock. It takes a modicum of intellectual effort to appreciate fine art and great literature, whereas playing Temple Run and Subway Surfer requires none. It’s the cultural equivalent of white sugar. I can win the war simply by leaving the children to their own devices, whereas Caroline has to strain every sinew to prise them away from their screens.
Which is why St Ives must have struck her as such an attractive holiday destination. In her mind’s eye, it was a cultural oasis. The children would be forced to write poetry and decorate eggs for want of anything else to do. It would be an arts and crafts boot camp, a seven-day mass culture detox programme.
Luckily, the reality fell far short of the dream. The Primrose Hill version of St Ives exists, but it’s been superimposed on a traditional Cornish seaside town. For every gallery, there’s a fudge shop; for every pastel-coloured beach café, a bakery selling pasties. It’s as if there are two St Ives sitting alongside each other — a microcosm of the larger cultural war that’s being fought in the nation. For the most part, the conflict is just beneath the surface, but occasionally it bursts into the open. I overheard a local resident praising an Eastern European man for opening a corner shop. ‘The last thing we need is another bloody gallery,’ she said.
Caroline was clearly disappointed that St Ives wasn’t the living museum she’d hoped, but rather than capitulate she decided to focus all her efforts on our daughter. That was sensible, since Sasha is already showing signs of refinement. Unlike her brothers, she sometimes reads books without having to be bribed first with chocolate, and she’s been known to make things out of Lego that aren’t either vehicles or weapons. Her idea of a joke extends beyond accusing one of her siblings of farting.
A typical morning in St Ives consisted of Caroline taking Sasha to the Barbara Hepworth sculpture garden, while I took the boys off to the local amusement arcade. The girls would spend a couple of hours enlarging their souls and we would try to win lollipops in a mechanical version of the Grand National. On the last day, they made a snail mosaic out of different coloured stones on Godrevy Beach, while we watched QPR versus Everton on my computer in an ice cream parlour.
The schizophrenic nature of the place suited us quite well and we thought about enquiring to see whether the house we’d rented was available in the summer. But we were advised by a waitress at the Pothmeor Café that St Ives becomes completely overrun with tourists during July and August, like a seaside version of Oxford Street.
Poor old Caroline. It looks like she’ll have to resign herself to my idea of a perfect summer getaway: two weeks in Vegas at the MGM Grand. The boys are going to love it.
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